Three Priorities for Restoring Ottawa

Lower your costs, where only the City can act. Return control to the people. Live up to our true potential.

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I’m recruiting 1,000 people ready to work together to win back our city. Follow here for my values, priorities and thoughts on how we get Ottawa back on track.

1,000 People Can Take Back Ottawa
We Need a Candidate Who Can Win the Mayor’s Race
Who Really Runs Ottawa?

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Status quo is broken

I grew up in Ottawa. I love this city. But over the past two decades, I’ve watched it decline under successive mayors.

Instead of tackling the challenges facing ordinary people, past mayors allowed a handful of powerful developers to set the agenda. In particular, to decide which big ticket items get funded with your tax dollars.

For this Council, that means:

• $500 million for Lansdowne to bail out the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group, led by the head of the Minto Group.

• $600 million for new pipes to the far southeast, paving the way for Taggart to build a fourth satellite city outside the greenbelt.

• $95 million for land to build a dump, even though the appraisal value for that Taggart-owned land was only $23 million.

It’s crony capitalism. Where City Hall favouritism fuels profits.

What does that mean for the rest of us? Crumbling roads that never get fixed. Transit that leaves you stranded. A downtown in decline.

This city can be turned around — when ordinary people stand up and demand better. 1,000 committed individuals can take back Ottawa.

It means taking on the cronies and the power brokers who profit from the status quo.

Agenda for a better Ottawa

It also means a new agenda for a new city.

The people of Ottawa can develop that agenda together in the days ahead.

For me, restoring Ottawa means a relentless focus on three priorities for City Hall.

1. A city that makes life affordable, where only the city can act

For too many households, costs keep climbing while incomes stay flat. City Hall needs to be a partner in affordability, not just a tax collector.

Nobody likes paying more taxes. But Sutcliffe’s one-trick pony of low tax increases is a distraction. He saves the average household maybe $50 a year, while real costs spiral out of control.

A serious affordability agenda at City Hall means:

• Real choices for getting around the city so households can decide if they want to take on the cost of a car, or even a second or third car.

• Homes built at a scale that provides anyone looking for a place to live with good choices in a competitive marketplace, including with publicly-provided options.

• Systemically correcting how much City Hall pays for everything so that tax dollars can actually go toward the basics people depend on.

That’s how we save families thousands of dollars.

2. Return control to the people

Across the city, local communities feel like they have lost control over the decisions that affect them the most, including the hyper-local issues in their neighbourhood.

We can change that. We can have a people-centred City that:

• Makes budgeting participatory so each of us have a say in how our tax dollars are spent in our ward.

• Reinstates local control over local issues allowing communities to better shape their own futures.

• Gives local communities the ability to determine the priorities for local road safety.

This isn’t just about fighting the status quo, it’s about giving residents the power to build the city and the local communities they want. When ordinary people have a real voice, City Hall can return to working for everyone.

3. Live up to our true potential

From a young age, I knew Ottawa was an amazing city and the place where I would want to spend the rest of my life. Ottawa had the benefits of a small town with many big city amenities from being the nation’s capital.

We’ve grown a lot since then, and we’ve lost a lot of what we once took for granted. But at its core, Ottawa is still an amazing place. We just need a City Hall that stops making bad decisions and instead allows us to realize our full potential.

We have an abundance of human, financial and natural resources, but have failed to use those to better the lives of everyday people. Achieving our true potential means a city that:

• Gets the basics right, and delivers major projects competently. A city that just works is the building block for living up to our potential. But we also need a city that can deliver the major public works we require. Residents have largely lost faith in City Hall to deliver anything of scale, whether that’s a train, a dump or simply removing a convoy off our downtown streets. It’s time to re-engineer how City Hall works and hold our leaders accountable for results.

• Lets its residents lead. Many of us have a deep love for this city, and are prepared to roll up our sleeves to move it forward. But City Hall provides little room for us to be a part of shaping Ottawa’s future. Public engagement is mostly performative, often leaving people even more frustrated with the city after that process. Not everyone has the time or desire, but for those who do, we need a City Hall that lets its people dream up, design and be a part of solving the solutions to the challenges, big and small, facing our communities.

• Works with, rather than against, our federal partners. Ottawa City Hall has too often treated the National Capital Commission and other federal agencies as adversaries, rather than partners in realizing our civic ambitions. It’s time to start working constructively with the feds to advance Ottawa, and mobilize the tens of millions of federal dollars that previous mayors have left on the table.

Your thoughts

What are your priorities for Ottawa? Do they align with those I’ve laid out above or would you focus on others?

I want to hear what you think. And in the days to come, we can dive into the specific proposals that flow from these priorities.

We’ll also look at how City Hall works and what needs to change to deliver on a vision of a better Ottawa.

Change is possible. 1,000 of us working together can unrig City Hall and defeat the status quo.

The Thousand. Committed individuals who love this city, expect better from City Hall and are ready to do something about it.

So here’s the question:

Will you be one of The Thousand?

Next Up: Winning Ottawa. Governing Differently.